How Cooking to Find Romance Helped Me Realize Who I Really Was

Liesl Schillinger had always seen making food as a romantic gesture—but then she realized that not everyone she was serving dinner to agreed. Her new take on why we cook for others will inspire you to gather a group for dinner.

Mar 26, 2016

TED CAVANAUGH

A couple summers ago, an appealing man I'd recently met invited me to spend an afternoon together, strolling through the park, ducking into cafés and cheese shops. I wasn't sure if it was a date, but as our time wound down, he asked, offhandedly, if I could come over to his place the next night and play hostess at a dinner party for eight. "Oh, you cook?" I asked. "Not at all," he said, laughing. "But you do, right? I thought you'd want to do the cooking." Looking at him quizzically, I said, "Um, do you have pots and pans, wooden spoons, silverware for eight?" "No," he admitted. "But I can buy them!" he continued. "Just tell me what to get. Or wait," he paused. "Why don't you cook at your place, and bring the food over?" He began to explain what his friends would and wouldn't eat (a couple were vegans, a few avoided shellfish or gluten), until I interrupted and told him that, sadly, I already had plans. I didn't say that those plans were only to not spend the next 24 hours orchestrating a meal for six strangers and a new friend whose intentions were opaque. Was this a test? I felt like he was auditioning me for the role of girlfriend before we'd even held hands. But was he?

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Strangely, this wasn't the first time I'd met a man who almost instantly suggested I host a dinner party for him. A few months before, I'd met a banker who tried to clinch a home-cooking deal with me 10 minutes after we exchanged cheek kisses. As he enthused about this imaginary dinner, he told me about a woman he wanted to invite, to impress her. Every cell in me recoiled, but I was relieved that everything was clear. He wasn't looking to romance me. He just wanted me to help him give a good party.

I do like to entertain; in fact, it was by throwing an impromptu dinner party that I got together with my first husband. After meeting him at a restaurant brunch, I was so dazzled that I spontaneously invited the whole table (of 12) to supper that night, so I could give him a culinary demonstration of my feelings. Over roast pork, spinach soufflé, a giant apple pie, and many bottles of wine, we fell in love. We got engaged two weeks later… and divorced three years after that. In retrospect, we really had only one important thing in common: We appreciated the bond of a shared meal.

Author Liesl Schillinge

SARAH SHATZ.

Since then, I've fallen in love many times, and I find myself trying to re-create the kind of talismanic dinner that makes romance stick. In my first post-marriage relationship, I discovered that my boyfriend didn't care for my chicken Kiev or beef stroganoff; all he wanted was grilled cheese. Our appetites were incompatible in so many ways, and gradually, the love between us starved.

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My next boyfriend attached no significance to sharing a mealtime ritual. When I put out the best china and made veal piccata and stuffed tomatoes, I saw it as a declaration of love. But to him it was just dinner. He would come home, pick up his plate, and head to the den to watch TV, which made me feel as shunned as if he'd pushed me out of bed. Yet I kept trying, thinking he would eventually accept my gustatory offerings and, by accepting them, affirm my love. He didn't.

Cooking, that ritual in which I invest so many emotions, is something many men seem to associate with entertainment, like bowling. Still, I'm not alone in assuming that when a man and a woman invite friends to a feast, they are dating.

We were united not by romance, but by a sense of occasion.

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Last Oscars season, a close friend—a handsome unmarried man—sent Paperless Post invitations to dozens of our friends, in which he asked them, in both of our names, to an Oscars party at his place. I didn't realize I'd be so prominent on the invite—I just thought I was helping him cook. A woman who'd been seeing a lot of him, but wasn't sure if they were dating, emailed me: "I'm so happy for you!" She assumed we were an item and hadn't told her. Not at all, I reassured her. But as I set about chopping and braising, I felt vindicated that her instincts backed up my own: that a joint social affair and an affair of the heart go together.

And yet… were we right? The Oscars dinner turned out to be exceptionally fun, and soon after, when a female friend invited me to a dinner party, I surprised myself by volunteering to cook. When I cabbed over with the meal—skate fillets, carrot soup, quinoa salad, and pavlova—nothing spilled, and the party was terrific. As I returned home in the wee hours with my empty pots, I reflected that I had just done for her the very thing I had refused to do for my mystery date that summer.

But there was a difference: I was genuinely close friends with my Oscars cohost, and this cohostess. The three of us were united not by romance but by a sense of occasion. When I thought back to the joyless meals I'd cooked for boyfriends and the exuberant feasts I'd thrown for friends, I began to see that the food of friendship brought surer rewards than the food of love. And I resolved to quit examining the motives of men who want me to cook for them, and ask only: Do I want to? And if the answer is yes, I'll get out my whisks. Who cares if romance is on the menu? If I'm cooking, at least there will be dessert.

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